Is there somewehere a FAQ concerning the use of SSDs with AmigaOS 4.1? If not, here are some questions...

1. AmigaOS does not have TRIM support and probably never will as discussed here earlier. Thus, is there any sense of using SSDs in their current state with AmigaOS...?

2. How to choose a drive which would work best with AmigaOS? Some manufacturers claim that their internal 'cleaning' processes are adequate for an OS without TRIM support. E.g. Crucial has in their SSDs so called 'Active Garbage Collection', but has anyone tested this with AmigaOS? Does it really work...?

3. What is the correct way to prep and partition a SSD (with HDToolbox)? If I have understood right, the borders of partitions should be placed in a certain way... Does HDToolbox do that automatically with SSDs?

Gregor wrote:Some manufacturers claim that their internal 'cleaning' processes are adequate for an OS without TRIM support. E.g. Crucial has in their SSDs so called 'Active Garbage Collection', but has anyone tested this with AmigaOS? Does it really work...?

Automatic trim can only work in conjunction with wear-levelling. And wear-levelling only works if there is enough unused space on the disk. This means:- leave some space without partitions- never format a partition. Only use quick-format

What is the correct way to prep and partition a SSD (with HDToolbox)? If I have understood right, the borders of partitions should be placed in a certain way...

Change geometry so that one cylinder is 1 MB (2048 blocks). Then partitions will be aligned automatically. Do not use 1008 or 2016 blocks per cylinder.

What filesystem(s) should be used with SSDs?

Use a file system which supports different block sizes and set block size to 4096 or 8192.

thomasrapp wrote:Automatic trim can only work in conjunction with wear-levelling. And wear-levelling only works if there is enough unused space on the disk. This means:- leave some space without partitions- never format a partition. Only use quick-format

Change geometry so that one cylinder is 1 MB (2048 blocks). Then partitions will be aligned automatically. Do not use 1008 or 2016 blocks per cylinder.

Use a file system which supports different block sizes and set block size to 4096 or 8192.

Thank you for your advice!-) Maybe this information could also be added into the AmigaOS wiki? There was hardly anything about using SSDs yet... They are becoming more and more common but it is not easy for ordinary end users to figure out all these details, especially how to adjust the geometry.

Gregor wrote:Some manufacturers claim that their internal 'cleaning' processes are adequate for an OS without TRIM support. E.g. Crucial has in their SSDs so called 'Active Garbage Collection', but has anyone tested this with AmigaOS? Does it really work...?

Automatic trim can only work in conjunction with wear-levelling. And wear-levelling only works if there is enough unused space on the disk. This means:- leave some space without partitions- never format a partition. Only use quick-format

What is the correct way to prep and partition a SSD (with HDToolbox)? If I have understood right, the borders of partitions should be placed in a certain way...

Change geometry so that one cylinder is 1 MB (2048 blocks). Then partitions will be aligned automatically. Do not use 1008 or 2016 blocks per cylinder.

What filesystem(s) should be used with SSDs?

Use a file system which supports different block sizes and set block size to 4096 or 8192.

Gparted:"The Cylinder/Head/Sector values reported by modern disk devices no longer have a direct physical relationship to the data stored on the disk device. Hence it is no longer valid to use this alignment setting to achieve enhanced performance."

Srtest wrote:Gparted:"The Cylinder/Head/Sector values reported by modern disk devices no longer have a direct physical relationship to the data stored on the disk device. Hence it is no longer valid to use this alignment setting to achieve enhanced performance."

Exactly. That's why you have to edit the geometry manually. Using the values reported by devices, you still get this 63/16 thing. To get proper performance from an SSD you should enter values which ensure megabyte alignment.

An SSD has its own way of writing data. Normaly an SSD doesn't only write one Block to the disk. It does some merging (to 256 or 512KiB I think).

A partition should not cross this "merged" block to get better performance. If you set the alignment to 1MiB you can be sure of that. It could be lower but you would need to know the details of your SSD, so the general rule is 1MiB.